Alexander Masters. (2016). A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Alexander Masters. 2016. A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Alexander Masters. A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/101/387/CF/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/101/387/CF/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374714536
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B01DJ0Y0LM
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374714536
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780374178185

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Alexander Masters

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

A Life Discarded

dateAdded

2017-01-06T03:35:24.54Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=2650755
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Life Discarded 148 Diaries Found in the Trash

crossRefId

2650755

subtitle

148 Diaries Found in the Trash

id

101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F

starRating

4

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: ALifeDiscarded_9780374714536_2650755
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 7199744
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374714536
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 10/18/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=101387cf-318d-41c9-9039-0463df125b0f&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: ALifeDiscarded_2650755
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B01DJ0Y0LM
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 10/18/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=101387cf-318d-41c9-9039-0463df125b0f&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: ALifeDiscarded_9780374714536_2650755
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 7199749
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374714536
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 10/18/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=101387cf-318d-41c9-9039-0463df125b0f&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Literary Biography
2. • value: Cultural
3. • value: novelist
4. • value: Literary Criticism
5. • value: British
6. • value: Autobiography
7. • value: Social History
8. • value: author
9. • value: France
10. • value: Europe
11. • value: social
12. • value: Personal Memoirs
13. • value: British Literature
14. • value: writing life
15. • value: literary nonfiction
16. • value: award winning authors
17. • value: alexander the great life
18. • value: alexander the great life story
19. • value: Famous authors
20. • value: award winning writers
21. • value: literary biographies
22. • value: bestseller book
23. • value: british best sellers
24. • value: best books of the year
25. • value: unique books
26. • value: diarists
27. • value: anonymous diaries
28. • value: anonymous memoirs
29. • value: best british books
30. • value: best british nonfiction
31. • value: illustrated diaries
32. • value: illustrated literature
33. • value: stuart a life backwards
34. • value: uk bestsellers
35. • value: diarist
36. • value: discarded women
37. • value: alexanders life
38. • value: biography of the life of a famous writer
39. • value: the lives of famous writers

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Masters, Alexander
   • bioText: Alexander Masters is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, which won the Guardian First Book Award and the Hawthornden Prize; was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Biography Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and was made into an award-winning film produced for the BBC and HBO. He lives in Sussex.
   • name: Alexander Masters

publishDate

2016-10-18T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

A Life Discarded

fullDescription

Alexander Masters, the bestselling author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap
In 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation.

A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life. The author of the diaries, known only as 'I,' is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Part thriller, part love story, part social history, A Life Discarded is a biographical detective story that unfolds with the suspense of a mystery but has all the warmth, respect, humor, and dazzling originality that made Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards such a beloved book.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "An affecting, bittersweet portrait of an anonymous person rescued--if rescued it is--from obscurity quite by accident ... A lovely, elegant book of interest to historians and biographers as much as to general readers."
2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from December 5, 2016
     With surprise, humor, and quiet insights that never seem glib, biographer Masters (Stuart: A Life Backwards) pursues an extraordinary question: what is the value of an ordinary life? With wonderful excerpts, original handwriting, photographs, sketches, and extravagant speculation, Masters brings to vivid life the 148 anonymous diaries that come into his possession, and constructs a richly compelling narrative around his experience of discovering their owner. The narrative of the diary author’s obsessions, ambitions, great loves, and disappointments is scaffolded with mysteries and discoveries that keep Masters revising his initial assumptions. He employs graphologists, private detectives, concert pianists, and judicious trespassing to understand his subject, but enjoys the anonymity, “sense of quiet universality,” and truth captured in this scrupulously documented existence. Despite some shortcomings, Masters’s subject has produced something impressive and unprecedented: “a forty-million-word description of being alive.” As much a guided tour of Masters’s own mind as that of his subject, this book is funny, original, astonishing, and poignant in its revelations that, in biography as in life, there are no tidy answers—but there is an incredible value in the ordinary, in “the resonance of tiny things” and “triumphs of a scribbled-down life.” Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge, and White (U.K.)

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 15, 2016
     An affecting, bittersweet portrait of an anonymous person rescued--if rescued it is--from obscurity quite by accident.The yarn begins when British social worker Masters (Simon: The Genius in My Basement, 2012, etc.) discovered a load of books thrown out in a skip--what we'd call a dumpster--in one of those eureka moments for bibliophiles: "Clustered inside a broken shower basin, wedged into the gaps around a wrenched-off door, flapping in the breeze on top of the broken bricks and slates, were armfuls of books." But not books, really. Instead, they were the diaries of someone who, with hurried hand and buffeted heart, filled 148 volumes from margin to margin with the marginalia of life, thousands of words. Tracing them back to a half-century earlier, Masters set to wondering about the identity of the author. It would be ungallant to reveal what he discovered in his quest for that identity except to say that the writer, whom he ultimately sniffed out, wasn't opposed to being uncovered, and for subtle and complicated reasons. Part of Masters' account is an entertaining tale of scholarly detection during which he relied on the talents of a graphologist of a sort who might have been put to work at Bletchley Park a couple of generations earlier. In a Sherlock-ian flash, she lists many of the writer's details, to which an amazed Masters asked, "you can tell from the handwriting?" The reply: "I can tell that from reading what she's written. Haven't you tried doing that yet?" But part of his account is also a gentle meditation on lives of profoundly quiet desperation--the lives of most people, in other words, who will never be enshrined in diaries, even discarded ones, to say nothing of books about them. The sad developments in Masters' own life as he researched and wrote make a poignant counterpoint. A lovely, elegant book of interest to historians and biographers as much as to general readers.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

32

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/101387cf-318d-41c9-9039-0463df125b0f/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

101387cf-318d-41c9-9039-0463df125b0f

starRating

4

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/101/387/CF/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/101/387/CF/{101387CF-318D-41C9-9039-0463DF125B0F}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

10/18/2016

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780374178185

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

Alexander Masters, the bestselling author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap
In 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation.

A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life. The author of the diaries, known only as 'I,' is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Part thriller, part love story, part...

sortTitle

Life Discarded 148 Diaries Found in the Trash

crossRefId

2650755

subtitle

148 Diaries Found in the Trash

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO007000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
2. • code: BIO025000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Editors, Journalists, Publishers
3. • code: BIO026000
   • description: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs